TheCivilWar and theOrigins of theColoradoTerritory

2013/03/28 by Susan Schulten · 2 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #American Environmental and Regional History #American History and Culture #Archaeology and Natural History #Economic Justice #History #Law #Political science

paper · doi:10.2307/westhistquar.44.1.0021

openalex publication_date 2013/03/28 · openalex created_date 2016/11/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

We commonly acknowledge that the extension of slavery into the West was a primary cause of the sectional crisis. Yet we tend to treat these two mid-nineteenth-century narratives as geographically distinct: a battle over slavery engulfs the East while mineral rushes and migration transform the West. Here the creation of the Colorado Territory is framed within both these developments as well as in the shifting conception of American geography in the 1850s.

Cited by

• Jefferson Davis and Proslavery Visions of Empire in the Far West
• Colorado Organic Act [wikipedia]

Related

• Colonial Becoming
• “A Species of Slavery”: The Compromise of 1850, Popular Sovereignty, and the Expansion of Unfree Indian Labor in the American West
• The Iron Horse in Indian Country: Native Americans and Railroads in the U.S. West
• “Whenever we exist on any land, we know it is our country”: Cocopa Mobility and the Colorado River in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1887–1936
• Beyond North and South: Putting the West in the Civil War and Reconstruction